Grey areas reshape the Assange debate

A popular new social movement in Sweden, dedicated to exploring the “grey areas” of sexual life, has been accused of being a campaign directed at Julian Assange, with tweets between the organisers talking of naming the movement after one of his accusers, and coaching each other to “keep the story close to the Assange situation”.

The tweets seem to contradict claims by the organisers that the movement was only inspired by the Assange situation, and had no focus on it, and the leading figures are all well-connected friends of Assange case complainant Anna Ardin.

PrataOmDet (Let’s Talk About It) has become a sensation in Sweden, since it was simultaneously launched by half a dozen leading Swedish journalists on December 20 last year. Its website features a range of stories about sex that went wrong, sex people didn’t want but acceded to, and all points in between.

Journalist Johanna Koljonen, who co-founded the group, says that the movement began as a twitter conversation “talking to people on twitter about how difficult it is to even think about the Assange case in a rational manner”, and telling of some bad “grey area” sexual experiences. Koljonen says she took no position on the case:

“Even if we’re able to unthink the troubling consequences for WikiLeaks if the allegations turn out to be true, and even if we’d by magical means find out the facts about what really happened in the contested situations, we probably still wouldn’t agree on how the facts should be interpreted.”

Asked to write it up for a newspaper, she organised a group of other writers by twitter to publish similar accounts on the same day, and needing a name for it:

“I tweeted, again very casually, that this thing in the papers was happening, and mentioned that obviously anyone who wanted to start on twitter was welcome to #talkaboutit — #prataomdet. I remember thinking that we would need a hash tag for the links to the articles …”

Indeed when PrataOmDet hit the Swedish media on Monday December 20, it had the appearance of a spontaneous uprising against s-xual coercion, by a group of journalists with little prior connection.

This was not the case. As contributors to the Swedish site Flashback discovered, the common link between many was Ardin herself, who was a twitter friend (i.e. following and followed by) to 12 of the most prominent 18 or so initial contributors to the movement.

Though Koljonen gave the impression of being at some distance from the case, she was in fact a close friend of Ardin’s, the first complainant in the case. Indeed, according to her twitter feed, she spent time with Ardin, and another woman whom police would subsequently interview as a witness, on the week Assange arrived in Sweden.

Another key organiser, Sofia Mirjamsdotter, denied knowing Ardin at all, on the collective blog Same Same But Different.

Yet her twitter feed showed that she had exchanged tweets with Ardin half a dozen times, most recently in July last year, asking about a restaurant one had attended, talking back and forth about it.

That there would be connection to Ardin was hardly earth-shattering, given the interconnections of a leftish feminist media network in Stockholm. Nevertheless, the connections, as mapped on the Flashback website were pretty striking.

Twelve of the 18 or so initial contributors to prataomdet, were twitter friends of Ardin’s, including most of the journalists who wrote and published pieces simultaneously in late December when the campaign was launched.

Yet perhaps the clearest sign that this campaign had other agendas was contained in the twitter discussion that proceeded the launch. Contrary to Koljonen’s claim that the name prataomdet came to her, one other idea was suggested:

@barsk we write various articles with a common tag of some kind. All publish about the same time. stand straight in the shit storm.
2010-12-14 21:18:47 via Twitter for iPad in reply to Barsk

… We’re aiming for Monday and must all talk to our editors, thursday latest. Regardless of what the newspapers say, we can blog on Monday
2010-12-14 22:38:19 via Twitter for iPhone

I think ‘#thanks anna’ is a nice little tag, but sounds like we’re taking a position on the issue. I like ‘I am Anna Ardin’ also but the same problem?
2010-12-14 22:41:34 via Twitter for iPhone

Okay decided, on argument: just because Anna’s name is known does not mean we should keep repeating it, so obviously we write without it!
2010-12-14 22:53:26 via web

The tweets pretty clearly indicate that the campaign was not only Ardin focused, but also Ardin-leaning. Despite Koljonen’s protestations that it was impossible to know what happened, there were no suggestions of a #thanksjulian tag. Ultimately it seems that that the only reason an Ardin name was decisively rejected was because it would continue to breach her privacy.

Nor does the discussion suggested a loose coalition of writers, but rather a media push being tightly co-ordinated, a feeling reinforced by a retweet by Koljonen [jocxy]:

danielbjork @ @ elingrelsson jocxy That said, I think that everyone who writes on Monday should be clear and keep everything close to the Assange situation.
2010-12-14 22:41:19 via web for Mac
Retweeted by jocxy

The push was spectacularly successful, and at a key moment in the case. On December 14 when the rapid organisation began, Assange had just been granted bail by the UK magistrates court, while he was awaiting extradition. Finally released two days later, he said that he had been warned of a “big counter-attack”. The day after Assange’s release, The Guardian published “10 days in Sweden”, a report by Nick Davies drawing on a copy of the 100-page police file on the case, leaked to him.

Then, the next Monday, PrataOmDet hit, and reset the Swedish media agenda for weeks to come. Of itself, the stories on its website do not disadvantage Assange. Indeed as the legal reform blogger Goran Rudling notes, they may even help him, because they demonstrated that the whole idea of “consent” and “willingness” in sex crime, was so confused in Sweden that no one knew what they were talking about.

But at another level, the campaign has reshaped the debate in the country where Assange will be tried, giving the impression that a vast sexual grey area has been expanding for too long, and that it is time to put a stop to it. And what explosive, high-profile trial might make that possible?

CORRECTION:

11/4/11 The original version of this story contained a line about a story published by Nick Davies in The Guardian on December 18 2010, headed ‘Ten Days in Sweden’. It suggested that The Guardian’s story was ‘heavily skewed’ against Assange and that it omitted ‘much of the ambiguity and contradiction’ from a Swedish police report. We accept that there is no evidence to support the suggestion that the coverage was deliberately skewed and we have agreed to permanently remove the line.

I’m an Assange supporter and I find it fascinating to have the events surrounding his case examined in detail but I think you go too far in your breathless claim that these people are “Twitter friends” and therefore that means there’s a conspiracy. I follow and am variously followed by people like Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Turnbull, etc. but I would be horrified if someone described any of them as my “friend”. Following someone doesn’t mean you’re friends or you agree with them, just that you are willing to listen to what they say. Journalists seem to follow each other to see what everyone else is saying so it stands to reason they would all be linked via Twitter.

I don’t know where GR is going with all these pro-assange conspiracy stories…Twitter feeds! Lobby groups! Secret links between people! Please.
Informing people of the Swedish law and various scenerios that may result in a sex crime is a good thing isn’t it? For both males and females. Maybe it was set up to stop the whole episode happening again. I’m sure the complaintants wished it had not happened.

I’m afraid you haven’t quite grasped the full story here. One of the core 12 who started the PrataOmDet campaign on Twitter also acted as a witness for the prosecution - ie she was at the Crayfish party and she’s a CLOSE friend of Ardin’s. Go to the Rixstep website - they’ve got the full original Twitter feed. Once you read it, it’s quite obvious it’s a deliberate orchestration.

Rod Taylor: Members at the Flashback forum have mapped out the relationships between the participants in great detail, and many of them are close personal friends of the accuser. They are Facebook friends, they appear together on photographs, go to parties together and comment on each others blogs.

Swedish newspapers published several dozens of articles by these friends of the accuser. Most were totally unrelated stories of sexual abuse by an anonymous perpetrator. Yet they all linked their stories to the Assange case, and most featured his photograph.

The campaign very successfully reshaped the public’s perception of the Assange case.

Prataomdet contacted Jessica Valenti and she had no doubts about what the campaign was all about. From JVs blog:

“Johanna Palmström, an amazing young Swedish feminist I met in Denmark last year, alerted me to a Twitter campaign that’s started up in defense of one of Assange’s accusers. She’s being smeared and mistreated on Twitter and in Swedish social media spaces, so feminists there have started a campaign, #prataomdet – in English, #talkaboutit. From Johanna:

“In the wake of the doubt and skepticism directed toward the women who filed charges against Julian Assange, journalist Johanna Koljonen recently tweeted openly and intimately about drawing lines, gray areas, and crystal clear violations in sexual situations. Hundreds followed Koljonen’s example on Twitter under the hashtag #prataomdet (”#talkaboutit”). As a result of this debate, several Swedish magazines, newspapers and other media outlets are publishing pieces on the subject. Something is going to change. We are going to dare to #talkaboutit.”

Find out more about the campaign here, and please consider tweeting your support!”

What gets me is that this particular set-up serves two ugly purposes. In addition to demonizing (and possibly jailing) Assange on frivolous charges, it has, yet again, caused deep fissures between American feminists and other progressives. The whole Wikileaks/feminist controversy has smelled like classic Cointelpro tactics from the beginning.

The use of identity politics to divide the progressive movement dates back to Gloria Steinem’s stint with the CIA in the 1960s. I write about my own close encounter with some of her agents in my recent memoir THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY ACT: MEMOIR OF AN AMERICAN REFUGEE (www.stuartbramhall.com). I currently live in exile in New Zealand

PILLOCK: I clicked on your link. It’s fair and reasonable to take a look at the hordes rushing to defend two so-called feminists. (Who have successfully dragged the feminist cause back several decades!)

Six posts: 17Dec-25Dec. (I’m sure you can provide the PTD link where there will be other supporters of Ardin. That is OK. But it won’t be in meltdown, simply because there are machinations that are quite correctly being questioned.

Assange may well be guilty of that if which he stands accused. The evidence to date is spurious at best.

Feminists are NOT fools!

This matter would have brought them to global howling protest. Why hasn’t it?? Why would global feminists largely disassociate themselves from these women and their supporters?